In modern society, communications networks such as the Internet enable vast numbers of persons to communicate a virtually limitless variety of information across great distances. The development of the World Wide Web has enabled persons with relatively little technical training to find and display information in a multimedia format using a browsing device, such as a personal computer or television set-top box (STB), running a browser program, such as MICROSOFT.RTM. Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. As a result, the number of sites and the number of users on the Internet have concomitantly experienced meteoric growth.
For aid in accessing the Internet, many users subscribe to Internet access services, such as the WEBTV.RTM. Internet access network. (WEBTV is a registered trademark of WebTV Networks, Inc. of Mountain View, Calif.) The WEBTV Internet access network includes a large number of browsing devices, referred to as client terminals, and at least one host server. The client terminals are connected to the Internet via conventional modem pools, either by Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) connection, a telephone line, or another data link, and can directly access web pages established by Internet publishers. The host server communicates with the client terminals to provide a convenient standardized interface for accessing the Internet. The host server also offers supplemental services, such as email, news reports, television program guides, and enhanced access to certain web pages for subscribers of the service.
As the audience of users of these Internet access services has grown, so too has the potential of such services to deliver advertising content through the Internet. Unfortunately, while a healthy variety of advertising methods exists for publishers of Internet sites, vendors of Internet access services face a lack of methods by which they may effectively deliver advertising content to their subscribers.
The publisher of an Internet site is able to advertise by several presently known methods. For example, a publisher may include advertisements in graphical banners or audio jingles on an Internet site. A publisher also may include a text or graphical link to another web page containing information about an advertiser or advertised product. It is also known to embed hidden advertisement links within a standard hypertext link to a destination Internet site. When a user selects the link, intending to go to the destination page, the user also unwittingly triggers the embedded link, and is briefly shown an advertisement before the browsing device continues to download the destination page. This type of interstitial advertising requires the user to wait while the browsing device downloads and displays the advertisement. Interstitial advertising methods are also known in which advertising information embedded in a web page or in the home page of the browser, or cached in the client browsing device itself, is presented in response to selection of a hypertext link on a web page (see Judson, U.S. Pat. No. 5,572,643, the disclosure of which is herein incorporated by reference). These advertising methods also delay the user during download of the advertising information.
Publishers of Internet sites typically advertise using "pull technology". Pull technology is so-named because a user must request information, or pull it, from a server before the information will be sent to the user's browsing device. For each of the above-mentioned forms of advertising, the user must direct the browsing device to download the information.
Despite the availability of advertising methods for publishers, Internet access services face several problems when advertising. First, pull technology is not an effective means of distributing advertising for Internet access services. Often an Internet access service merely offers the user a dial-up connection to the Internet. In such a case, the Internet access service is largely invisible to the user. The user typically uses a modem to dial a phone number and establish a connection to the Internet, and uses an off-the-shelf browser program to access web pages through the Internet. Pull technology cannot be used to distribute advertising to a user of such an Internet access service because the user is not accessing any web pages published by the Internet access service.
Other Internet access services, such as the WEBTV Internet access network, offer Internet access via a proprietary interface allowing access to subscriber services, such as a web directory and search engine, as well as to the Internet. Pull technology may be used to advertise directly to users of such an Internet access service, but only when the users are accessing the web pages published by the Internet access service. When users simply use the Internet access service to view external web pages on the Internet, not published by the Internet access provider, pull technology is ineffective to distribute advertising.
When a user's browsing device is pointed elsewhere, Internet access services must resort to "push technology" for advertising. According to push technology, a server pushes information to a browsing device without request from the user, or based on a predetermined request from the user. Current push technology causes the user two types of delay. First, the user experiences delay as the browsing device takes time to download the pushed information. Second, the user is delayed when interrupted by an unrequested display of pushed information. Such delay may be annoying to the user, and may decrease the effectiveness of the advertising due to the intrusive nature of the advertisement.
Current browsing devices also cause the user delay. For example, the browsing device may experience delay when connecting to external devices and remote computers via a communications network. Particularly when using a relatively slow connection to the Internet and downloading large amounts of data, a user may have to wait a significant amount of time for a web page to download. This type of inherent delay in using the browsing device further aggravates the user and decreases the enjoyment of using a browsing device to navigate a communications network.
In addition, advertising methods that present advertising too frequently, or too repetitively, often have a negative effect on the user. For example, a user presented with an advertisement at every transition between web pages may become disinterested in the transitions, and ignore the advertising. Further, where push technology is used to deliver advertising that is irrelevant to the user, the user may become conditioned to ignore the advertising.
It would be desirable to provide a method for distributing data wherein data is downloaded from a host server across a communications network and displayed by a browsing device without causing delay to the user of the browsing device. It would also be desirable to utilize inherent delays in browsing device operation, such as download waiting periods between web pages, to display advertising. Finally, during the inherent delays, it would be desirable to periodically display data, such as news, sports, weather, or other information relating to a topic selected by a user, in combination with or in the stead of advertising data to provide interesting and various content to the user.